


Bullets and Biscuits

by SelanPike



Category: MS Paint Adventures, Problem Sleuth (Webcomic)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-19
Updated: 2011-11-19
Packaged: 2017-10-26 07:11:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/280229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SelanPike/pseuds/SelanPike
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Slick told you to collect intel on Pickle Inspector. You suspect it will be a complete waste of time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

You are Diamonds Droog and your boss has sent you to gather intel.

“Gather intel”, he said! He must have felt awfully smart using words like that. As it is you don’t really see the point. Problem Sleuth and his cohorts hardly pose a threat to the Midnight Crew and it’s a waste of time trying to assess their weaknesses or whatever it was Slick told you to do.

Slick is spending the day following Sleuth about, and Deuce and Boxcars are both tailing Dick. You presume that, even with their combined wits, they won’t come up with much. You got stuck tailing Pickle Inspector.

The interesting part comes when, as you listen to the wiretap on his phone, Sleuth asks the Inspector to tail you. Gather intel, assess his weaknesses, all that jazz. Sometimes it makes you sick how similar Sleuth and Slick are.

So when Pickle Inspector steps out of his apartment building you make sure to walk by and not notice him. You continue not noticing him as you go about your usual errands, going to the tailor, to the post office, mundane things like that. You make a point of ignoring him when he accidentally sidles into your field of view while you’re buying stamps and you especially do not groan when he knocks over a shelf at the grocery store while trying to get a better look at you.

The fact that he really thinks he’s doing a good job is almost cute.

At about half past one you take a seat on a bench in the park. You reach into the paper bag you brought from the grocery and produce from it two sandwiches wrapped in cellophane. You set the second one down on the empty space next to you.

“Care to join me for lunch, Inspector?” you say.

He stumbles out of the bush he was crouching behind. He doesn’t look surprised at all, just embarrassed. “Ah, yes,” he stammers, “Thank you.”

He sits down, taking the sandwich and slowly picking away the wrapping. “I’ve been very rude, I think,” he says to you as he ogles the bread. “I forgot to bid you a good morning.”

“That’s quite all right,” you reply.

“I’m really very sorry,” he insists.

“Don’t worry about it,” you say.

He takes a bite out of his sandwich. His discomfort is palpable and he avoids eye contact with you the whole time. Clearly this is not a man who enjoys much social contact. He finishes eating before you and proceeds to twiddle his thumbs and stare at his bootlaces while he waits for you to finish and break the silence.

You take your time.

You don’t know why Slick thought you’d need all day to figure this rube out. Everything there is to know about him is written all over his face. Awkward, clumsy, probably got picked on a lot as a kid. Polite to a T, almost as if he’s waiting for his mother to come scold him if he’s even a little bit rude. You’ve heard of his intellectual prowess and you suppose his intelligence suits him, but a man like this is easily intimidated into submission.

He’s no threat. Sleuth or Dick may require you to get your hands dirty, but this one? No. He’s little more than a scared puppy.

When you’re done you carefully fold up the used cellophane, place it in the bag, and stand up. You straighten out your suit.

“Thank you for your company,” you say, taking the wrapper from his thin hands. “We really must do this again sometime.” You turn away. “Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

“Wait.” There’s urgency in the Inspector’s voice. When you turn around, he’s on his feet and holding a key.

“Oh my,” you say, not bothering to sound scared. “Watch where you’re pointing that thing.”

“L-look,” he says, “I don’t like… I don’t like violence. I don’t want a fight. But you guys keep causing trouble and hurting my friends and—and it’s really rude! A-a-and, and I can’t stand it!” His hand shakes, uneasy with a dangerous weapon. Well, an object that could potentially be a dangerous weapon. You wonder if he means for that key to actually be a key or if he just forgot how to make it a gun. “Please. Please, leave us alone.”

You should come up with some sort of cold, biting quip right now, but the scared puppy analogy keeps creeping back into your head. Suddenly you’re imagining a tiny little puppy barking at a wolf. It takes everything you have not to burst out laughing.

You pull together your composure and take a step toward the Inspector. You lean in close, until your mouth is right next to his ear, and he shudders at this intrusion of his personal space.

“Make me,” you hiss. Cliché, you know. It’s hard to come up with clever comebacks when little puppies are barking in your head. What sort of fantasy is this, anyway? You’ve been spending too much time with Slick and his stupid Scotty dogs.

All those thoughts of dogs fall away at the sound of a gunshot. You put a hand to your side and bring it back up bloody. He shot you? _He_ shot _you?_

“I-I—I’m sorry,” he murmurs, his voice cracking. “But you said…”

You clutch the wound. You’ve seen worse, but damn if this suit isn’t ruined. You just have to go get yourself patched up. You have to get to—

“You should be okay though,” Pickle inspector continues in that damn sorrowful voice of his as he pocketed his key. “I-I didn’t shoot you anywhere immediately vital. And your favorite underworld doctor-type fellow has an office just down the street from here, I think, doesn’t he? And I believe that, lucky for us, the doctor is indeed in today.”

You blink at him blearily. How did he know that?

He smiles faintly at your expression, and you realize. You underestimated him, and he planned on that. You smile back, a bitter smile you reserve only for when you’ve truly been bested.

“Yes,” you say. “I’ll be going.”

“Do—do you want me to walk you there?” His concern is genuine. You resist the urge to slit his throat and spill that neurotic, courteous blood all over the damn sidewalk.

“Yes,” you say through ragged breaths. “Yes, I would like that.”

He hesitates, then slips his hand in yours. His fingers, those long, bony things, intertwine with yours and he lets you lean against him as you struggle to not look like you’re walking around with a bullet hole in your abdomen. He hands you a handkerchief to try to slow the bleeding. He says you can keep it, if you want. He starts talking about something else, but it’s irrelevant drivel. You assume that he’s trying to distract you from the pain, but you don’t really need it. You’ve been shot before and will probably be shot a few more times before you finally bite the big one.

He leads you into an alley and finds the door.

“Again, I’m really, really sorry,” he says. “And the suit, too, I’ve ruined it, haven’t I? I—I—I can’t pay to replace it, oh gosh now that I look at it it’s so nice, I’m such a heel, I’m sorry…”

“Shut up,” you say.

“S-sorry,” he says again, then softer he says, “Mister Droog,” like he doesn’t feel worthy to address you.

“Perish the thought,” you say, gripping the doorhandle like it’s the only thing between you and the distant bottom of a ravine. “Perhaps you can make it up to me by treating me to dinner sometime.”

“Ah, yes,” he says, playing with his tie. “That sounds wonderful, yes. Please pick a time and a place, I would love to.”

“I’ll send for you, now please.” Your vision begins to dim. You think that maybe the Inspector shot you in a more vital area than he thought. “Leave me to my doctor.”

“Ah! Yes. Sorry. Thank you for lunch. Goodbye.” He turns and slouches away, his hands in his pockets and his ambling gait disguising a purpose that even now you hardly understand.

You push open the door to the office of your morally-questionable doctor. As he gets to work stitching you up your mind wanders.

A time and a place…?

By the time you leave you have just that figured out.


	2. Chapter 2

He promised you dinner, but when you thought about it you realized that, with your tastes, it was impossible. You knew how much money he made a month and let’s just say that his compensation was inadequate. But there was a challenge to be had here and you’d be damned if you weren’t going to face it.

So you, Diamonds Droog, decided to meet Pickle Inspector for tea.

He arrives a half hour late, which you anticipated. The tea is still warm when he takes his seat. He nervously inquires about how much the bill will come to, but you assure him that it is within his budget before offering him a scone.

He’ll need it. He probably won’t have enough money left for dinner. You only promised he could afford the tea, after all.

You ask him about his recent cases. He prattles on about some broad who hired him for something entirely dull and you’re sure he’s not telling you what he’s actually working on. Probably because what he’s working on involves you and the rest of your gang. He finishes talking and scratches the back of his head, adjusts his hat, and asks how your crime is going.

“Oh…” You take a sip of your tea. “You know.”

He nods, furrowing his brow as though thinking what a stupid question that was. You do, in fact, suspect that he knows. Or maybe he doesn’t. You can’t actually figure out what he knows.

And therein lies the challenge. You’ve always prided yourself on being able to read people, on being able to figure out what they’re thinking and what they’re going to do and why they’re going to do it. It’s what makes you the fearsome gangster you are. Anyone can shoot someone—as dear Pickle Inspector has proven to you—but a ne’er-do-well without a certain sense will find himself with a bullet in his head rather quickly. In fact, you have enough of this sense to go around, as proven by the fact that you can more than make up for your crewmates’ complete lack of it.   
When you think about it, you can’t think of any time when you haven’t been able to figure someone out. But here’s this nervous wreck sitting in front of you and for some reason you just can’t read him.

You start to wonder if he’s smarter than you.  
It shouldn’t bother you as much as it does. You’ve always known that surely there are people out there who are more intelligent than yourself. You know that. But you’ve never actually met anyone that you considered your intellectual superior before now, and it’s him, and it’s maddening.

“Uh.” He puts his teacup down and steals a glance at you, avoiding eye contact. “M-Mister Droog?”

“Yes?”

“Are you alright?” he asks. You wonder if you accidentally let something show in your facial expression. Maybe you tried too hard in your efforts to look impassive.

“Of course,” you say.

“Does… does it hurt?” He motions at your side, where he shot you.

It does. It hasn’t even begun to heal, owing to the fact that you’re determined to hide your injury from your crewmates. As a result you’d been involved in much more strenuous activity than you really should have been in your condition. You keep reopening the wound, but you prefer that to letting Slick and the others know that you were shot by Pickle Inspector, of all people. Besides the laughs they’d have at your expense, they would eventually start to ask why you didn’t kill him in response.   
You’re having a hard enough time answering that to yourself.

“Maybe you could, um.” He rotates his teacup about 35 degrees on its saucer, then back again. “T-tell them you have the flu? So you can get some rest.”

You look at him. Your expression is aggressively impassive. He wrings his hands.

“I—I saw you at the docks last night,” he explains. “You’re being so reckless.”

It isn’t too late to kill him, you think. You have your deck of cards in your coat pocket and everyone in this café knows who you are. Nobody would dare stop you.

“I have certain responsibilities,” you say to him. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

“So reckless,” he repeats.

“Exactly what were you doing at the docks?”

“Oh…” He looks up at you. “You know.”

“Most people would have better sense,” you say, putting down your teacup. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten, due to the ease with which you pulled off that lucky shot last week, but I am a very dangerous man.”

“Yes,” he says, looking down again. “Yes. I know. I’m sorry.”  
He picks his teacup up again with shaking hands and takes a sip before saying, “You’re… yes. Very dangerous.”

You watch him put the tea down, take a bite of his scone, then take another sip of his tea. You speak, but you feel uneasy doing it. You are making a wild assumption and you have no idea whether it’s true, but you are determined to take the offensive in this exchange.  
“Is that why you’re in love with me?”

The Inspector chokes on his tea. He puts his teacup down with a clatter, splashing tea on the tablecloth, before picking up a napkin and wiping his mouth. He takes entirely too long with it and you suspect that he’s trying to hide behind the piece of cloth.

“That’s—that’s not true, I—“

Under the table you clench your fists. You’ve guessed wrong and revealed how little you know. Damn it all!

“That’s not why…” he continues, his voice cracking. “I—I like you in spite of that, I…”  
You relax.

He buries his face further in the napkin, clutching it tightly in his bony fingers. “Oh gosh, oh gosh… how did you know?”

You go over the checklist of emotions you should be feeling. Relief, that your bluff paid off. Confidence, in that you now have the upper hand. Anticipation, for all the clever manipulation you’re going to subject this poor man to now that you’ve extracted a weakness.

There’s another checklist forming in your head, but it’s less organized and you can’t make out the handwriting. You disregard it.

“The way you held my hand,” you mumble. You don’t usually mumble. You don’t usually explain your logic, either.

“I’m sorry,” the Inspector pleads. “I’m sorry, just… just forget I ever…”

You stand up. He looks up at you with his eyes wider than you’ve ever seen them. You can see a faint blush peeking out from under his napkin-shield. He whimpers under your gaze. You take a step to stand over him. Looming. Intimidating.  
Then you take the napkin away and put your hand on his cheek. You force him to look up at you, even if his eyes still won’t meet yours.

And then you kiss him.  
It’s a con, of course. You know that.

He hesitates before accepting the kiss wholeheartedly. He parts his lips, letting you slip your tongue inside.   
This, too, is a con.

You move your hand behind his head, pulling him in closer. Keeping him from getting away.  
Also a con.

You don’t normally have to keep reminding yourself that. You are perfectly capable of manipulating someone without repeating your purpose in your head over and over. That’s what stupid people do. That’s the sort of thing Clubs Deuce would do, and it wouldn’t work and he’d end up setting something on fire. Why do you keep doing that?

When you pull away and look at Pickle Inspector’s face, you understand.  
This is not a con.

You start to be able to make sense of the second checklist. It seems you’ve just done the first thing on it, so that’s good. You still can’t make out the rest, so you wing it.  
“My dear Pickle Inspector,” you say, still managing to keep your expression the same. “I have a spare ticket to the opera tonight.”

“I—I can come?”

“And I will treat you to dinner,” you add.

“That sounds… it sounds lovely, thank you,” he says, still blushing. “But I thought… you were, um… going to go with Mister Slick…”

“You know that too, do you?”

He nods. “He won’t mind, will he…?”

You walk back to your seat and sit. “He’ll be ecstatic.”

“Y-you aren’t… um… you know, planning any crime during it?”

A smile escapes your lips, albeit a faint one. “Are you going to shoot me again?”

“I—It’s not like I want to, no…”

“If it makes you feel better, you could probably disable me by giving me a good jab in the last bullet hole you gave me,” you say. “There’s no need to bother with that key of yours.”

He lets out a nervous chuckle. “Good to know, thank you.”

“I think you should meet me at my place first,” you say, pouring him another cup of tea. “I don’t suspect you have any clothes that won’t embarrass me, so I’ll have to dress you myself.” He blushes again. “I don’t think I have anything in your size, but anything I have would be better than…” you gesture at his clothes. “That.”

He looks down at his rumpled clothes. “O—Okay, if you think so…”

“I suppose you know where I live, too?”

He scratches his head, glancing upward in thought. “Oh, um… which place? The one with the, um…”

“The one on fifth,” you say.

“Yes, I think I know the one.”

“I thought so.”

He fidgets. “J-Just so you know, I—I’ve been trailing you for the sake of my job…” He wrings his hands. “It’s not because I… you know… I just… if you were planning anything against Sleuth or Dick or…”

“Obviously.” You finish your tea.

You look at your watch. The waiter comes back with the check. He hands it to you, which you then hand to Pickle Inspector. His eyes go wide at the price.  
You stand up.

“Five o’clock, sharp. Don’t keep me waiting.”

He keeps ogling the bill. “M-Mister Droog, I can’t afford…”

“Of course you can,” you say, absently brushing dandruff off of his shoulder. “I know things too. Like the contents of your bank account.”

“B-but I—It was only tea and scones, why does it cost so—”

“Don’t worry about it,” you say. “I’m buying dinner, remember?”

He whimpers. You pat him on the back. “See you soon.”

You walk away as he reaches for his wallet. As much as you’re looking forward to your night at the opera, what you aren’t looking forward to is what comes after. After all, if he knew that you’d invited Slick to come… you were going to have to spend all day tomorrow pulling wiretaps out of the hideout’s walls.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I originally wrote these chapters as two separate pieces, but they kind of go together so I'll just upload them together.

**Author's Note:**

> I originally wrote these chapters as two separate pieces, but they kind of go together so I'll just upload them together.


End file.
